Contact Me

Author Katie Mettner

Search

Menu

The Girl With No Name by Lisa Regan

I've been waiting for the second book in The Detective Josie Quinn Series to release for several months! I had the chance to read it back in December and couldn't put it down! I even went so far as making my husband drive the 2 hours to family's homes so I could read. That's a good book ;) Below you'll be able to read the blurb and the first chapter as well as my review. If you love thrillers and a strong female detective, then you don't want to miss the Josie Quinn series. The first book in the series, Vanishing Girls, was also reviewed by me. You can find that information here.

Detective Josie Quinn is horrified when she’s called to the house of a mother who had her newborn baby snatched from her arms.A woman caught fleeing the scene is Josie’s only lead, but when questioned it seems this mysterious girl doesn’t know who she is, where she’s from or why she is so terrified…

Is she a witness, a suspect, or the next victim?

As Josie digs deeper, a letter about a mix-up at a fertility clinic links the nameless girl and the missing child to a spate of killings across the county. Josie is faced with an impossible decision: should she risk the life of one innocent child to save many others… or can she find another way?

The Girl With No Name is nail-biting, twisty and impossible to put down. If you love gripping thrillers from Angela Marsons, Robert Dugoni and Rachel Caine, you’ll be hooked.

CHAPTER 1

NEWS 5—Akron, Ohio

October 27, 2016
Local Teen Dies in Hit and Run

A nineteen-year-old boy died tonight after being fatally struck by a hit-and-run driver in Highland Square. The teenager was found in the street just after 5 a.m. by a resident walking his dog. He was transported to Akron General Medical Center where he was later pronounced dead. His name has not been released pending notification of his family. There were no surveillance cameras near the intersection where the hit and run occurred. Police are urging anyone with information to come forward.

After reading Vanishing Girls by Lisa Regan last year I was chomping at the bit for the second in the series. When I finished it (in one day) I was NOT disappointed! I love all of Lisa’s books, as she has an incredible talent to keep the twists and turns coming at a pace you can just barely stay on top of, and you never want to put the book down until you’ve figured out whodunit. I wasn’t sure how she was going to outdo Vanishing Girls, but The Girl With No Name was equally as mind bending and thrilling, with an enjoyable personal storyline for Josie.

Josie Quinn is a seasoned police detective, but as a woman who struggles with her past, it also affects her present relationships. The fallout from the events in Vanishing Girls has hit Josie hard, not only in her personal life, but also in her professional life. As the new boss she feels a loss for the joy she used to have in finding the bad guys herself. Having to stay hands off isn’t something Josie does well, and she sinks into this new case with her usual moxie. What she isn’t expecting is for her now recovered boyfriend to be on the losing end of the stick, again. What happens in her time of need has brought many good detectives to their knees, but Josie perseveres for the number one reason, a missing baby girl. She will damn the consequences of her actions before she damns the baby to a life without a family. The twists and turns of this story take us places you never expect on page 1, but by page 337 you’ll look around and think, “wow, now THAT was a story.”

I enjoyed the insight into Josie’s personal moments which the author brings into the story during the dark hours of the investigation. You always wonder how cops internalize and process a lot of what they see and experience, but when it’s happening TO you and you’re also the one responsible for solving the crime, how do you allow yourself those personal moments of ‘break down’ so you can keep going. The author writes these scenes beautifully and I think had she not, a facet of the character would be missing.

As always, I struggle to review Lisa’s books without giving away spoilers because everything is connected and so expertly woven there is no way to untie the knot and not have it unravel, so I’ll end this review by saying if you haven’t read Vanishing Girls, read it, and then jump back into Josie’s life in The Girl With No Name, you will thank me later!

I give The Girl With No Name five cups of stay up all night and read coffee!

Lisa Regan was born in Philadelphia, a product of two large Irish Catholic families whose roots run deep in her neighborhood. From the moment she was able to put words onto the page, she was writing: poems, stories, and even novels. At age eleven, her parents bought her a typewriter, on which she wrote her first full-length novel. By the time she was eighteen, she had written four terrible young adult novels. Between eighteen and twenty-two, she had a crisis of confidence and although she kept writing, she was unable to finish any novel-length projects. She spent her time working in bookstores while completing college. She spent two years at the Community College of Philadelphia before

transferring to Bloomsburg University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master of education degree. To make ends meet, she worked as both a certified nurse assistant and a karate instructor. In 2002 she finally finished her first adult novel, which remains on a flash drive in her nightstand. In 2006, she finished what would become her first published novel: Finding Claire Fletcher. After being passed over by more than 150 agents and then more than a dozen publishers, her first novel was published in December 2012, followed by her second novel, Aberration, in June 2013. Finding Claire Fletcher won Best Heroine and was runner-up for Best Novel in the 2013 eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards. It was a finalist for the Kindle Book Review's Best Kindle Book Awards in 2014. In December 2013, the novel reached number one on Amazon’s Bestselling Kidnapping Crime Fiction list; in the same month, her second novel, Aberration reached number one on Amazon’s Serial Killer Crime Fiction Bestseller list. Lisa currently resides in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter where she works full time and works on her future novels while waiting in line at the local post office.